Carnival Sky (15 page)

ON A STILL, BLUE SATURDAY Sheff and Georgie went to Wanaka with Jessica and Emma. Jessica took her car because she was dropping off a cat that had been treated at her clinic and kept overnight. It was a smallish tabby that languished in a carry-cage on the back seat between Emma and Sheff. ‘Mum said to keep your hands on top so the cage doesn’t rock too much,’ Emma instructed him.

‘Quite right,’ and he did as he was told. ‘We don’t want him being carsick, do we?’ he said.

‘It’s a girl cat.’

‘Oh, okay.’

‘She’s going home again after being in hospital,’ Emma said firmly.

That home was on a side road close to Clyde: a large, wooden house with wrought-iron scrollwork beneath the verandah roof, and knee-high gleaming blue and red ceramic plant pots flanking the steps. Sheff showed willing by getting out and carrying the cage to the front door, where he and Jessica were met by a slim woman already dressed to go out. When complimented on her appearance by Jessica, she said she was about to leave for an exhibition opening at the new gallery. She was eager to comfort her pet, and while Sheff held back the spring door of the cage she lifted the tabby out. Although it had seemed comatose while in the car, the cat responded to the woman’s
grip by sinking its claws into Sheff’s hand as it passed. ‘The poor thing’s completely traumatised,’ its elegant owner said. She cradled it while Sheff wound his handkerchief around his hand.

‘Are you okay?’ Jessica asked him.

‘It’s fine. Just scratches,’ he said.

‘Do you want to come inside and put something on it?’ the owner said unenthusiastically. ‘I’m off in just a moment myself.’

‘No, it’s nothing,’ said Sheff.

‘Anyway, I’d keep her in the house for a day or two,’ said Jessica. ‘She should be fine now, but let me know if she doesn’t perk up.’

‘I couldn’t bear anything else to happen to her,’ the woman said. ‘She never seems to keep well. Just one thing after another.’ She had the door closed before Jessica and Sheff had reached the bottom of the steps. She was uncharacteristic of the local women, but he made no uncharitable comment to the others.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Jessica when they returned to the car. Emma was briefly interested to see the bright blood on the handkerchief.

‘You made the girl cat angry,’ she said.

‘It always seems to be something with you, Sheff,’ Georgie said.

‘A paradoxical omen. It means the rest of the day is bound to be completely wonderful.’ He was resolved that it would be so, and leant towards Emma to share her book that told of the ballet aspirations of a mouse. He couldn’t help but speculate, however, on the range of bacteria that might exist on the claws of a sick cat, and repressed the wish to ask Jessica about possible infection.

The trip seemed much shorter than he remembered – through the gorge, past the garish giant fruit sculpture at Cromwell and on through the yellow country to Lake Wanaka, with bare hills on the horizon like a jaw of worn teeth. Past the township and then the short drive to Glendhu Bay with pigfern frothing at the road side just as he remembered it. Hundreds of people were already there: in the water, on the narrow, sloped beach of grey grit dappled with quartz, or farther back among the willows, the tower pines, the caravans and
house trucks on the grass. Sheff was surprised at the number, but it cheered him to be among so many people whose only concern seemed to be enjoyment.

Brother and sister had brought no swimming togs south with them, but they wore shorts and stood in the lapping ripple while Jessica took Emma into deeper water, towed her by her arms, encouraged her to shout and splash. The water was wonderfully clear, and the quartz pebbles lay like shells on the lakebed. How bracing the water, even though it was ripening the scratches on Sheff’s hand. Afterwards they walked the lake line for a time, watching others, meddling with the minimum debris: contorted driftwood, cast lake weed and leaves in curved lines, the odd opaque plastic bottle and one green jandal. Emma found a stick, bone-white from exposure, and trailed it as a tail in the stones. A little apart from the others, Sheff noticed that Georgie, even without shoes, still had the typical rise and fall in her walk, while Jessica’s gait was an easy and even stroll. Her stomach bulged slightly in the one-piece costume, her breasts above tautened the fabric, her thighs were smooth and solid, her expression open and slightly quizzical. A good-looking woman.

They went past the boat-launch site with its warnings of didymo and lagarosiphon, on to quieter reaches. Just beyond the high-water mark they found a measure of shade by a willow, and Sheff spread a rug and the three adults settled there. Emma played in the shingle while covertly watching other children nearby, appraising their possible willingness to let her join their game. Sheff had a floppy hat of Warwick’s, and he lay with it over his face. It had the faint smell of his father, and also the ineffable fragrance of hot sun on fabric that was part of his memory of childhood. With eyes open he could see just a suffused blood glow from the sun, with eyes closed the noises surrounding him seemed to be accentuated – the cheerful voices, the occasional, distanced vehicle, or boat, and behind it all the regular, subdued susurration of the far-stretching lake.

The surroundings brought to mind one of his most powerful
memories of his father. They had been at the same beach as a family when Sheff and Georgie were still young and each summer day an epoch. They had sat on a tartan rug by willows, and briars with bright cherry rose-hips. Belize complained of sand blowing into the picnic things, and they were preparing to go home because of the rising wind. Most people had already given up for the day. Sheff, Georgie and Warwick had been swimming. The children were still in their togs, but their father was dressed again and starting to tidy up when the noise on the beach began to change, becoming focused and chorus-like as people crowded together to watch two youngsters struggling well out in the lake after the capsize of their kayak. Two dark heads bobbing when the chop allowed a view, cries, arms briefly flailing to catch attention. People had left the water, but several adults, including a large woman in a yellow sundress, rushed back fully clothed and laboured out, trying to get through the waves.

Sheff remembered how his father took time to kick off his shoes, drop his long trousers, before following. Warwick was a good swimmer, and soon he passed all the other would-be rescuers but one, and reached the two boys. He and the other strong swimmer didn’t attempt to drag the boys back through the waves, but remained there, supporting and calming them until a motor boat arrived and the emergency was over.

There was no medal, nothing in the paper, in Sheff’s recollection not even a visit made in gratitude from the boys’ parents, though surely that occurred; but there was the example of his father’s composure and ability to cope, and the oddity of Warwick coming back from the boat wearing just his wet shirt and underpants. They’d taken up the tartan rug and picnic things, and gone back to the car in the same way they always did after such outings, except that his father had no underwear beneath his dry trousers, and no shirt beneath his light, blue jersey. ‘All the kids needed to do was stay calm and stay afloat,’ Warwick had told Belize, and he didn’t talk about it any more. Warwick had acted well, and Sheff was proud of him, but it was all forgotten and lost, and
no one on the same lake beach now knew, or cared, anything of it, and the briar seemed to have been eradicated.

‘Are you sleeping, lazy bones?’ asked Georgie. She pushed his foot with her own.

‘Trying to.’

‘Jessica was saying that a gold-mining consortium did a lot of testing around the Old Man Range a year or so ago, and the rumour was they found plenty, but were waiting until prices go even higher.’

‘That’s the rumour after every round of exploration wherever it is,’ said Sheff. ‘It’s a lot more exciting than accepting yet another failure.’ He’d covered several such land and seabed drills in various parts of the country. Mainly they were in search of oil and gas. They began with high expectations and much publicity, yet almost all finally petered out, leaving merely industrial conspiracy theories and pub stories of lost opportunity. But Sheff didn’t want to spend time talking about any of that. He pushed the hat back from his face, sat up, and asked Jessica if she was content to live her adult life in the same place she’d spent her childhood. He liked to hear her talking about herself, not just because she was articulate and forthright, but because it conjured up an existence different to his own, and was a distraction from his father’s illness. And when she was talking he could regard her quite openly, without his admiration being apparent.

‘You could’ve had a fashionable practice in Christchurch, or Wellington,’ he told her. ‘Celebrity cats and parliamentary poodles. You’d get called into the zoo when the white tiger went down with appendicitis, or the orang-utangs had ankylosing spondylitis. Fame would attend you.’

‘He doesn’t even know what spondylitis is,’ said Georgie mockingly.

‘Do too. It gets you in the back.’

‘What a waffler,’ said Georgie.

‘I like ongoing programmes to do with larger-scale animal husbandry,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m involved with long-term research on
merinos, especially footrot. The use of Tylosin and Linco-Spectin, for example.’

‘You’ve got him there,’ said Georgie.

‘Pass,’ said Sheff.

‘Anyway, there was more than my career to think about. Kevin was happy here and Emma’s had the same friends for years. I think it’s tough on kids to go from place to place and have to begin all over again. But journalists are born wanderers, so maybe you think differently.’

‘I’ve been around a bit, but Central’s pretty good country to come back to,’ said Sheff. Some children, shouting as they jumped the ripples, reminded him again of his father’s exploits. ‘Do you remember Dad helping to save those boys here?’ he asked his sister.

‘Of course,’ said Georgie. ‘He swam out and helped hold them up. They would’ve drowned otherwise, it was so rough, and he never talked about it. He never talked about things enough, did he?’

Jessica had heard nothing of Warwick’s mild heroism, and Sheff was happy to let his sister recount it. Georgie had been an independent observer, and her story brought back detail he’d forgotten, or perhaps not registered at all. Yes, the big woman in the yellow dress had caused a secondary emergency, her courage not matched by ability in the water, and having to be retrieved from the waves. And yes, that was true, one of the boys was struck on the head by the rescue boat and was bleeding when they came in. How old would Warwick have been then? Forty-three? Forty-four? Much as Sheff was now, and how able, contained and assured, ready to parry whatever life thrust at him.

Jessica had brought muesli and nut bars and fruit juice as an afternoon snack. Emma ate more, and more rapidly, than the adults, and then was up again and off closer to the lake where she began gathering coloured stones. The women continued an easy conversation, but Jessica faced always towards her daughter. Sheff lay down again and put his father’s hat over his face. He was so still and so fully relaxed that he had no awareness of his body: just the eddying
sounds and smells of the beach and the trees, and the deep glow of the sun through the fabric although his eyes were almost closed. Jessica and Georgie talked about genetically modified food. Sheff was lulled by the voices of two people he knew and liked, and he was lying on the beach that had witnessed his father’s competence. He wished Warwick was with them: he wished he could tell him that he recalled the fine thing done, and that even when no one remained who had witnessed, or remembered, it would still be a fine thing. Why wasn’t he with them as once he was, filling a space now just air, dispossessed by time alone?

Sheff decided he would talk about it with his father sometime soon, and about the pilot whales that he’d seen run aground on the Far North beach close to Rawene at a different, later time, when, despite Sheff joining with other people to save them, the small whales just kept coming back, in hapless determination to die.

It was so easy to dwell on your mistakes and failures, Sheff decided. Surely it was a healthy thing to revisit instances of good judgement, selflessness and courage, trivial though they may have been. He took a long, lake-scent-laden breath through his father’s hat and sought such an instance in his own life. There was no rich harvest, but after holding his breath for longer than was comfortable, an incident from his third university year occurred to him. A political science paper and a tutor who was always called Polly behind his back. Sheff never knew why; the nickname had been bestowed by earlier students and the justification had departed with them. It hadn’t seemed to have much to do with the tutor’s sexual orientation, although he was mildly effeminate. He was not much older than the group he led, and his earnestness and palpable consideration for others were reason enough for Sheff’s fellow student Adam Michaelson to wish to undermine him. Michaelson took pleasure in putting others down: partly because he enjoyed their discomfort and partly because he imagined he himself rose as a consequence.

The tutorials with Polly took place in a lecture room, because no more
appropriate space was available, and the tutor had asked Michaelson to sit in the front rows with the other students after he’d several times ostentatiously sat alone at the back and out of a more intimate voice range. Some weeks later Sheff had a nosebleed on his way to the tutorial, and although he hurriedly tidied himself in the toilets, he was embarrassed by his wet, smeared shirt, and slipped late into a seat well back in the room. Polly had looked up and paused. He seemed about to say something to Sheff, but then gave a small twitch of a smile and carried on with comments about bicameral systems of government. Adam, however, saw the opportunity to bring himself centre stage, and broke in with apparent innocence to ask why Sheffield Davy had special dispensation to remain so far back from the group. Polly had no strong rejoinder, and Adam had scored in front of his peers. Sheff wasn’t responsible for the petty vindictiveness, but wondered if Polly would think he was a partner in it. So after the tutorial he waited a bit, and then went up with his sticky shirt and explanation. ‘I quite understand,’ said Polly. ‘Thank you. Nothing at all to worry about.’